Simply Hired simply scores a funding round of $12M

This brings the total raised so far to $34 million over five rounds. The new financing, announced Tuesday, will be used to back R&D in vertical search technology, data sciences and job seeker user experience, as well as to boost sales growth in the U.S. The company said on its website that, in 2013 alone, it made over 100 optimizations to its search algorithms.

“Our business is growing very quickly, but we are consciously unprofitable — and will be through the end of 2014 — as we invest in product innovation and scaling the business,” president and CEO James Beriker told VentureBeat.

“Having all of the content structured in a way that job seekers can search for is non trivial,” he added, “but is just the first step.”

Job searching is evolving from quantity to quality, Beriker told us. “Job seekers are increasingly beginning their job search on search engines because it is much more efficient than scouring job boards and company sites — and search is a very familiar paradigm for all of us.”

With an emphasis on searching, plus the site’s pay-per-click advertising model, he said that Simply Hired embodies the transformation in job searching:

“[It’s] very similar to the transformation we saw in the early 2000’s in marketing from display advertising to search engine marketing. HR and recruitment teams were slashed in the 2008/09 downturn — and there is more pressure now than ever on them to source high quality candidates quickly and at lower cost.”

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company operates in two dozen countries, offering six million different job listings for nearly a quarter million employers to more than 30 million job seekers each month.

Founded in 2003 and launched in 2005, the site aggregates listings from such other sites as job boards, social networks and classified listings, and it offers a pay-per-click model for advertisers.

The new funding, from existing investors Foundation Capital and IDG Ventures plus City National Bank, is a combination of equity and debt financing.